When you are trying to build a successful social media page that will help to sell your products and build you a big following, what’s important is to try and ‘sell the dream’.So what does that mean? It means focusing on you value proposition.

A value proposition meanwhile is the way in which your product or your service can change people’s lives for the better. What is it that people should get from your product if all goes well? The old saying goes that you don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads! This is to say that people don’t buy hats because they want to wrap fabric around their heads – they buy them for an end goal that will make life a little more comfortable. Your product and your service are more than the sum of their parts.

The Emotional HookThis is even more important when what you’re selling has an ‘emotional hook’. The ideal example here is the ‘Make Money Ebook’. This is just a PDF with lots of words, which in itself doesn’t offer that much value.

So the value proposition is tied to what those words can do for the person. And of course this means that you’re going to help your readers to become richer. More than that, you’re going to help them end the stress of debt and you’re going to help them to be more attractive to the opposite sex. They can go on lots of holidays and buy nice watches that make them feel more confident!

That’s the emotional hook and if you were trying to sell the product on a sales page, that’s what you’d focus on.

In social media, you don’t want to be so ‘on the nose’. Instead, your objective will be to focus on the lifestyle that is associated with the product you’re selling and to promote this through your channel.

How to Sell the LifestyleSo how might you do this? A quick look on Instagram will quickly show you how people are selling fitness products and clothing: they do it by creating a lifestyle and sharing images and videos of themselves working out, or just looking generally attractive in their clothes.

And this helps to gain them followers who want that lifestyle and who want to live vicariously. And it also generates a lot of sales – more effectively than any on-the-nose marketing attempt!